The Superbowl, According to FourSquare

In case you hadnt’ heard, the Super Bowl was yesterday. As a country, whether or not we cared who was playing, or even know the rules, we gather en masse to watch football, drink cheap beer and eat things covered in cheese — not necessarily in that order. It’s part of who we are: what better reason than four hours of Patrick Chung tackles, Eli Manning passes, bad touchdown dances, and expensive advertising to bring us together, despite all of our diversity.

The Super Swarm Sunday badge

As if we needed it, Foursquare is giving us yet another reason to believe that the Super Bowl is a defacto national holiday: “Super Swarm Sunday” is the biggest check-in of the year. Approximately 350,000 people checked in yesterday at Super Bowl events.

There were almost 3,000 Foursquare users (who actually remembered to check-in) at the event itself at Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium (capacity 68,000).

Foursquare has come to the conclusion (even though there were 2,500 different sports-bar check-ins yesterday) that most of us opted to watch the game from a couch, with chips and dip on hand, instead of standing shoulder to shoulder at a crowded bar, draining our bank accounts on pints of Bud heavy. An unsurprising, yet comforting, stat about the tradition behind the game.

However, going against what beer commercials often depict as an all-male football culture, where women exist to ruin fun and turn off sports for mature conversations about feelings or chores, Foursquare’s stats say that women were about half of all check-ins at Lucas Oil Stadium and accounted for 49 percent of Super Bowl-related check-ins total.

What was most revealing, however, is what an international spectacle the Super Bowl has become. There were check-ins shouting “Super Bowl” in 117 countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Macedonia — the top countries for check-ins included both Russia and Japan.

These statistics leave a few things to be discussed, like whether these large foreign numbers account for how dispersed Americans were yesterday or if they mean people overseas are as into it as we are, or for instance, how people are accessing the game, or what they mean in regards to the spread of American culture across the globe. Either way, it can be assumed that the Internet is the vehicle of global access, pulling people together in new ways every day.

Some more amusing facts:

Among the top 100 places worldwide for check-ins were Parque de Retiro in Madrid, Spain; Hooters in Naucalpan de Juarez, Mexico; Applebee’s in Sau Paulo, Brazil; and McDonald’s in Sandkan, Malaysia.

Professor Thom’s bar in NYC was the most checked into sports bar in the country.

If women weren’t at a Super Bowl event, they were at grocery stores, department stores, restaurants or getting coffee. (Ok, so maybe not all of us watched.)

Foursquare may have over ten million members, but the question remains whether it is a meaningful trend measuring stick. It might not be definitive, but it sure is insight into a people brought closer through sports, and apps.